Characters in this chapter.
Wei Suyin — Head of the clinic.
Pei Liang — Squad Captain over the cultivators.
Pei Hao — Pei Liang’s older brother.
Pei Yan — In the garrison cell.
Wei Suyin worked diligently on the last section of her dical treatise for the clinic soldiers. She couldn't help but let her mind drift to thoughts about the Mother Of Healing book she had written alongside Liu Jun, but now he was gone, as was Mother Pei. She drew in a breath to keep the tears at bay. She had to keep her mind busy in order to stop herself from crying.
Then Pei Liang suddenly entered the room and crossed the threshold. She finished up writing the last character on the paper when he crossed the room and sat near her.
His hand ca down over hers on the table in a warm and inviting touch. She had learned to love it, to crave it, and these days she craved it more and more.
"Suyin, I just had a eting with Fei Liao and Shan Pei. I want to tell you about it."
She looked up at him then. His face was tired and haggard, and his thumb moved against the back of her hand. Wei Suyin had realized long ago that he did this to soothe himself more than he did it to soothe her.
He told her.
He told her about Shan Pei and Shu Shu on the periter and the realization about southern cultivation. He told her about the eting with Fei Liao. He told her about the possibility of Commander Xu's signoff, about Chianji village, and the plan for the spring campaign.
He told her about the retrieval of Wu Bao from Western Reaches territory, and finally he told her that Pei Yan would be held alive in the garrison cell while the boy was brought ho, and that the boy's life would be the lever which Pei Yan would be useful to the Western Reaches.
He told her all of it.
His hand was warm around hers the whole ti.
When he finished, he was watching her, waiting for her to nod and squeeze his hand and tell him he had done the right thing. His thumb was still moving against the back of her hand.
She pulled her hand away from him.
The tiredness left his face in that instant.
"Suyin...?" He tried to reach for her hand again, but this ti she shifted her body away from him.
"I don't understand why you'd do this." Wei Suyin did all she could do to remain composed.
Pei Liang seed perplexed by her question.
"What do you an? I'm doing this for the village. We can turn her into an asset that can be used against Qinghe..."
Suyin shook her head.
"You're doing this for the village? No, you an to say that you're just doing it for yourself, right?"
He stared at her.
"What, for ? Suyin, no, that's not it at all. I'm just..."
"'You're' just...?"
Pei Liang let out an exasperated sigh.
"I'm just thinking about what's best for everyone."
At that point, Wei Suyin had heard enough. She stood up and clenched her fists. The hot tears began to swell in her eyes.
"Stop telling lies about how everything you've done has been for the village! Sparing the woman who killed our people, using her as a spy against Qinghe, escorting her through the South... I don't rember you talking to anyone in the village about that!"
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She walked back along the length of the table. Her hands were shaking now but she did not look at them.
"Suyin, I just wanted to try and turn sothing bad into sothing good. I really think that Pei Yan can be useful."
Suyin shook her head at his words. Her loose hair curtained her eyes.
"How am I supposed to believe you? You promised that we would talk about it later, but later never ca! You tried to do everything all by yourself when you had us right here!"
It hurt her deeply to say these things to him, and she could see it on Pei Liang's face that her words were cutting him. He tried to hide his trembling hand, but he couldn't do it. He held it against his chest but he couldn't hide it from her.
"I made the mistake, Suyin."
His voice was sharp. Sharper than it had been at any point in the night.
"Since I’m the one that made the mistake, then I have to be the one to fix it."
She stopped walking.
She looked at him across the table and she saw, for the first ti in the whole conversation, how frightened he was. His hand was still pressed against his chest. His jaw was set against the trembling.
"Liang..."
"I made the mistake, so you do not get to tell how I go about fixing it-"
"Stop."
She walked around the table and right up to him. She put her hands on his shoulders, one on each side, and she held him where he sat so that he could not pull away from her.
"You did not let us help you, and no one asked for you to do it all alone."
Pei Liang looked away, a tell that she knew all too well. He was going to try and rationalize everything. "Suyin, I..."
"Look at ."
He looked at her.
"We can do this together. I won’t allow you to think anything different."
He swallowed.
Her hands tightened on his shoulders.
"We all trust you, the entire village does. You don’t have to be like Pei Hao, we love you for who you are…"
He closed his eyes tightly, and she could tell that it pained him to hear that, which only confird to her that he was still grieving his brother on the inside, no different than how she was grieving hers. Except for Liang, he put pressure on himself to live up to the idea of Hao.
"Stop trying to fill the gap he left. Nobody asked you to do that."
She watched his face slowly settle, the raw pain that he tried so hard to hide began to slowly soften.
His shoulders dropped under her hands.
"You’re right,” He muttered half to her and half to himself.
She had not expected him to say that. She had expected him to push back harder and to tell her she did not understand what was at stake.
"It is scary how mature you can be sotis," he said.
His voice was quiet.
A small tired smile passed across his face.
"It must be because, unlike , you had the benefit of growing up with a family."
Suyin blinked.
She did not understand what he ant by that. Pei Liang definitely had a father and a mother, and even though his would-be sister had died, he did grow up with Pei Hao, who was his brother. So what he said did not make any sense to her. Liang saw the confusion and shook his head, then waved a hand as if to brush it aside.
"Never mind."
"Liang, what did you..."
"Never mind, Suyin. It is nothing."
She did not press him on it. She set it aside in her mind for later. She had the sense, the way she sotis did with him, that she had just heard a thought that wasn’t for her to know.
He went to his knees on the clinic floor and he lowered his head until his forehead was almost to the ground. His back was straight. His hands were on his thighs. His forehead dipped the last finger's width and rested on the packed earth.
"I am sorry, Suyin. I seem to have lost my common sense."
She smiled.
It ca up through the tears that were still on her face, and it was a small smile, and it was at the image of him bowed to the floor in the clinic being intense about an apology the way he was intense about everything.
She got down on the floor with him.
She knelt in front of him the way he was kneeling, and she reached out and took both of his hands in hers, and she lifted his head up with her thumbs under his chin until his eyes t hers.
"You know, the other girls used to say that you had scary eyes."
His brow furrowed slightly.
"But I never thought that, I’ve always liked them."
He looked at her.
"The other girls?"
"Mm." She nodded, and her smile grew. "I had my eyes on you from the start."
There was a breath.
Then Pei Liang laughed.
It ca out broken at first, then it opened into a real laugh, and she laughed with him. They knelt on the floor of the clinic and they held each other's hands and they laughed, and it felt like the tension in the room had cleared away.
When the laughter ran down, they were still holding each other's hands.
Suyin squeezed his hands harder.
"Tell the rest."
"The rest?"
"What you think Commander Xu is going to do."
He nodded. His expression shifted into the one she knew from the training ground, the one that ca over him when he was working a problem.
"I do not think she will accept it."
Suyin seed surprised by this. "You don’t?"
Liang shrugged. “I have a feeling that she won’t accept it fully, but she will see rit in using Chianji Village. What that ans for Pei Yan, I cannot say for sure.”
Suyin nodded. "And let’s say she does accept it."
He looked at her.
"Then I bring it to the village and ask what everyone thinks of it.”
She had been waiting for him to say that since the mont she had pulled her hand back from his at the table.
"Okay, I like that plan," she said.
She brought his hands up and she pressed her forehead to his. She held her forehead to his for a long breath now, and he breathed with her, and they stayed that way until her tears had stopped and his trembling hand had stilled.
Then she pulled back and helped him to his feet.
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